Theatre review: Hope has a Happy Meal

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: I saw the show a couple of nights before Press Night.

When she became a teen mother Hope (Laura Checkley) abandoned her family and baby son, leaving him with her sister to raise, and went travelling around the world. She cut off all contact but 24 years later she's returned home unannounced, to try and reconnect with what family she has left. But home is the People's Republic of Koka Kola, a cross between North Korea and M&M's World, where everything from the trains to the forests is owned and run by multinational corporations. Tom Fowler's Hope has a Happy Meal is a similarly jarring mix of styles and themes, which opens with Hope telling a rambling but clever joke, before turning into, variously, a fairytale road trip, a thriller, and a kitchen sink drama, all with a touch of surreal comedy and a sense that if the concept of hope returned after a long absence, its journey would be as rocky and weird as that of the character of the same name.

Theatre review: Akedah

Named after a Biblical term from Abraham's fakeout sacrifice of Isaac, Michael John O’Neill's Akedah follows two sisters who grew up in a turbulent household - their father was abusive, their mother a prostitute who abandoned her youngest daughter in a crackhouse and was never seen again. Gill (Amy Molloy,) the oldest, was 15 at the time and tried to look after her much younger sister for a while, but after their father died Kelly was taken into care, and the sisters rarely communicated after that. One night Gill gets a cryptic phone call from her sister asking her to come to her, and she manages to track down Kelly (Ruby Campbell,) now 18, living at a Pentecostal megachurch on the Northern Irish coast, where she's been since leaving her foster home two years earlier. Gill thinks she's there to rescue her sister from being groomed, but the truth may be more personal.

Theatre review: That Is Not Who I Am

Theatres are going to have to keep trying to make up their Covid losses for some years to come, so you can forgive them if they try the odd gimmick to get bums on seats. Or at least you'd think you could, but the Royal Court's latest show has come with an elaborate framing device that extends way beyond the stage and begins with the publicity; something that could be described as underhand but in reality feels more like the theatre overtly trying to create an air of mystery, so why it seems to have made some critics quite so angry is a bit beyond me. In any case the setup is that the venue had discovered a first-time writer, a man in late middle age called Dave Davidson, who'd dabbled in playwrighting before but not had anything produced until That Is Not Who I Am. This pretence barely seemed to last a couple of days before it was commonly known Davidson was the pseudonym of an established author. Now that it's opened the information is easy to find but just in case anyone's still trying to go in blind, I'll keep the spoilers for after this text break.

Theatre review: Scenes with Girls

With #MeToo, #TimesUp and other related hashtags popular themes in new plays over the last few years, there's no question theatre has engaged with the fact that women's position in society is long overdue a shake-up. But Miriam Battye's Scenes with Girls deals with the tricky question of just how easy it'll be to figure out what that new position is. For two best friends since high school, and now flatmates, it's all about taking the language and ideas of feminist forums and applying them directly to their own lives, but they've got very different interpretations of this: Lou (Rebekah Murrell) isn't interested in a relationship with a man but wants to have sex with a lot of them without feeling slut-shamed about it; she treats it like a man stereotypically would, proudly tallying up the number of her sexual conquests. (She has considered a relationship with a woman in theory, but is worried she'd be so prone to letting her have her way out of feminist solidarity that she'd become a doormat.)

Theatre review: The Woods

A fairly common thing on film, the ability to create the feel of a dream - or particularly a nightmare - on stage is rarer, and something I always find impressive and quite transfixing when someone gets it right; so Lucy Morrison's production of The Woods kept my attention even as it became apparent that Robert Alan Evans' play itself was going to be a frustrating affair. Shuffling around in a dirty summer dress, Future Dame Lesley Sharp's nameless Woman is simultaneously a young mother and an ancient crone of the wilderness, who comes across a Boy (Finn Bennett) unconscious in the woods and drags him to safety in a shack that she gradually has to pull apart to feed a fire to keep him warm. Nursing him back to health and feeding him, she's desperate to keep the boy safe while also resenting him; and somewhere in the trees lurks a charismatic Wolf (Tom Mothersdale,) who tries to tempt her away in various guises (including that of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, for some reason.) Possible spoilers after the text break, although personally I felt a lot of what I discuss was laid out too early in the play to really be considered much of a twist.

Theatre review: Manwatching

It originated at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of years ago, which may explain why Manwatching's high concept relies on a plentiful supply of stand-up comedians: The comic monologue is written by a woman, who's been kept anonymous for reasons that aren't entirely surprising (the fact that she mentions having trained as an actor made me think Alecky Blythe*, but it would be a major change of style for her, and besides, there's nothing to say it's an established playwright, for all I know this could be her first work ever staged.) Whoever she is, this is very much a woman's story, but delivered by a different man every night. The Royal Court has listed the male comedians who'll be taking part but not their schedule, so you don't know who your performer is until they arrive onstage - tonight it was Adam Buxton, to the obvious excitement of some of the audience, who walked out onto a stage bare except for an elderly printer. The printer's there because the comedians have no idea what the content of the monologue is; it prints out 45 pages of script while they introduce themselves.

Theatre review: Plaques and Tangles

Plaques and Tangles are two kinds of formations in the brain that are thought to be responsible for Alzheimer's Disease; tangles are also a good description of how Nicola Wilson's play is structured, and not always in the way the playwright, and director Lucy Morrison intended. Megan (Monica Dola) is in her forties, and fast approaching the age at which her mother (Bríd Brennan) died, driving a car the wrong way down a motorway. She had a hereditary form of early-onset Alzheimer's, and as she starts to forget words and get her memories mixed up, it becomes increasingly obvious that Megan has inherited it. In fact, concerned about whether she had the gene, she took a test decades ago, but never told her husband Jez (Ferdy Roberts.)

Theatre review: Who Cares

Continuing the theme since Vicky Featherstone took over the Royal Court of having shows explode out of the usual boundaries of its auditoria, Michael Wynne's verbatim play Who Cares technically takes place in the Upstairs Theatre. But before it gets there Debbie Hannan, Lucy Morrison and Hamish Pirie's promenade production takes the audience from the rehearsal rooms and offices behind Sloane Square station, to the staircases and corridors backstage, and the area that's usually the lighting booth of the Upstairs Theatre. This is all in service of us hearing the stories of, for the most part, workers in the National Health Service, building up a picture both of the emotional connection that this country has to the NHS, and exactly how it's being changed by successive governments - particularly the "stealth privatisation" brought in by the current coalition.

Theatre review: Pests

Vivienne Franzmann is a comparatively new playwright but one who's already demonstrated a great deal of range. After the playground politics of Mogadishu¹ and the family secrets of The Witness, she takes a turn for the violently lyrical in Pests. Rolly (Ellie Kendrick) and Pink (Sinéad Matthews) are smack-addicted sisters, but Rolly comes out of prison pregnant and clean. She moves in with her sister and attempts to work on the progress she's already made: She's made a friend who works rehabilitating women who've been in prison, and who should be able to set her up with a cleaning job. But if staying off drugs is hard, doing so while sharing a squat with someone who's still using is nigh-on-impossible, and Rolly can't see through Pink's attempts to sabotage her progress.